Theater review: V's not just for victory in popular 'Monologues'

LADY PARTS HAVE been much in the news lately, from Naomi Wolf's latest book, "Vagina: A New Biography," to Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin's now-notorious assertion that the female body has hidden biological mechanisms to prevent pregnancy from "legitimate rape."

In short, it's a good time for "The Vagina Monologues," Eve Ensler's ever-changing 1996 collection of theatrical monologues based on interviews with many women, young and old, talking frankly about their nether regions. But then it always seems to be a good time for that play; every spring productions pop up all over the world, often as benefits for women's shelters and the like.

The latest Marin County production is a nomadic one, because the producing company is between artistic homes at the moment. It's also between names: the former Shakespeare at Stinson is in the course of rebranding itself as Independent Cabaret Productions. In the meantime, it's using both monikers side by side. The show opened at Sausalito's Stage Dor Dance Studio last weekend and will hop around to other venues such as Mill Valley's O'Hanlon Center, Toby's Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station, Bolinas Community Center, Fairfax Community Church, the Sonoma Community Center, Sweetwater Music Hall and Santa Rosa's Glaser Center.

As directed by Hector Correa, it's such a no-frills staging that even calling it a production seems like a misnomer; it's more like a glorified staged reading. The actors sit on three chairs next to cloth-covered stools used as side tables. Music stands hold the scripts in front of them, and a simple black curtain hangs behind them. There's no lighting design, just whatever's available, and the sound system is a small portable CD player that one of the actors starts and stops on the stool beside her, playing various popular songs of female empowerment from Aretha Franklin, Cyndi Lauper, the Indigo Girls, Stevie Wonder, Nancy Sinatra, Sister Sledge and "Hair."

Despite the rinky-dink production values, it's an awfully entertaining show. The stories Ensler weaves together are witty, resonant and sometimes downright visceral, and they're recounted in effervescent turns by the three-woman cast of Miyoko Sakatani, Shannon Veon Kase and AnJu, trading off on various women's first-person stories and rapid-fire responses to questions about what their sexual organ would say if it could talk, or what it would wear if it got dressed.

"Let's just start with the word 'vagina,'" they say. "Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say." And indeed, the point of telling these stories is that a surprising number of women are uncomfortable talking about their reproductive organs or even looking at them. A lot of the first-person stories told are from the point of view of women who were either woefully ignorant of their private parts or tried to pretend they weren't there. Some have happy endings of awakening, and others keep that door closed.

Kase is winningly animated as an elderly New Yorker who closed up shop under the waist for the rest of her life after being mortified by her own moisture while making out with a boy when she was young. She talks about "down there" as if it were a broken-down basement, "closed due to flooding." Kase also plays an Englishwoman who belatedly learned to explore herself in a classroom setting, which she describes it in florid terms as a mystical experience. As a swaggering ex-lawyer turned dominatrix, she goes through a hilarious connoisseur's gallery of the moans of different kinds of women.

Sakatani tells the tale of a woman who learned to appreciate her sexual organ through dating a seemingly ordinary guy who gazed adoringly at it. She also plays a boisterous woman who wants to reclaim the C-word as infinitely superior to the alternatives.

After relating a horrifically gruesome tale of Bosnian rape camps in a vague European accent, AnJu charms the crowd with the endearing story of how a young woman who'd only ever had bad experiences with her privates learned to love them when she had her first lesbian experience with an older woman — the glossed-over complicating factor being that this was while she while still underage.

Particularly entertaining are the many group sections that all three deliver together, such as a hysterical litany of cutesy euphemisms for the vagina; a rant about feminine hygiene products and an empowering manifesto of dressing however you want that's also in Ensler's latest piece about teenage girls around the world, "Emotional Creature," which premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in June. The play closes with an appreciation of the wonder of childbirth, which the author added much later, realizing that aspect had been unaddressed in the play.

Because of the show's emphasis on women learning to love their vaginas, it's understandably low on voices from folks without severe body issues to overcome. Its mix-and-match nature leads to some awkward segues between the cheerful bits and the brutal ones, and some vagina fatigue may set in by the end of its hour and 45 minutes. But as a celebration of mentioning ladies' unmentionables, it's not just a force for good; it's also a treat.